[Bartweiss]

> Basically, the defense can't outpace offense, and we're doomed to forever be pwnd by manipulative people.

This might be a decent summary of where we are now, but I don't think it's inherent to the problem. To stretch a metaphor, antibodies to viruses are reactive, but white blood cells are proactive against new diseases.

I run a stack of privacy and attention defenses on my browser. Sometimes new attacks come out and I lose ground, as with browser fingerprinting. But sometimes new attacks come out and run aground on the protections I already have - the various cryptocurrency mining scripts, for instance, were all stopped because I disabled Javascript for unrelated reasons.

Blocking the intrusion of the day is a Red Queen situation, agreed. But it's possible to make the game asymmetric, to raise the cost of future attacks and so do better with each round of the pattern.